The estimation of the daily average global solar radiation is important since it increases the cost efficiency of solar power plant, especially in developing countries. Therefore, this study aims at developing a multi layer perceptron artificial neural network (ANN) to estimate the solar radiation in the city of Surabaya. To guide the study, seven (7) available meteorological parameters and the number of the month was applied as the input of network. The ANN was trained using five-years data of 2011-2015. Furthermore, the model was validated by calculating the mean average percentage error (MAPE) of the estimation for the years of 2016-2019. The results confirm that the aforementioned model is feasible to generate the estimation of daily average global solar radiation in Surabaya, indicated by MAPE of less than 15% for all testing years.
A Comparative Evaluation of Artificial Neural Network and Sunshine Based models in prediction of Daily Global Solar Radiation of Lalibela, Ethiopia
